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Flat Taxes and Angry Voters

By wide margins, Americans are now telling pollsters they want a tax system that raises more money and is more fair by asking the rich to pay more. They are connecting the dots between the lavish high-end tax cuts of the past decade and today’s serious problems — including widening inequality and mounting deficits — and demanding change. The Republican presidential candidates aren’t listening.

Take the flat tax plan of Gov. Rick Perry of Texas. For all his talk about how it would make filing easier — that is dubious — what it would really do is give high-income Americans a big tax break, while almost everyone else could expect relatively modest tax savings or none at all.

In his plan, taxpayers could choose to stick with the current system or use the flat tax, under which wages and salary would be taxed at 20 percent, versus a current top rate of 35 percent for the affluent. Investment income and multimillion-dollar estates would be untaxed, versus a current top rate of 15 percent on most investments and 35 percent on estates.

In a recent interview with The Times and CNBC, Mr. Perry said “I don’t care” about criticisms that the plan is a giveaway to the rich. He expressed the magical belief that more and bigger high-end tax cuts would spur economic growth and generate significant new tax revenues.

That’s a fairy tale, of course, and one that the conservative Republicans who vote in primaries love to hear. The rest of the country is feeling a lot more skeptical.

According to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll, nearly 70 percent of Americans say that Congressional Republicans’ policies favor the rich and that they oppose lowering taxes for large corporations. Two-thirds polled say that wealth should be distributed more evenly; a similar share wants to increase taxes on millionaires, not cut them. In a previous Times/CBS poll from August, a majority of Americans also wanted to use tax increases to close the deficit, rather than rely only on spending cuts.

Mr. Perry has not provided the details necessary to independently analyze the plan’s impact, but economists of the right and left agree that it would be a huge revenue loser. Mr. Perry’s main prescription for dealing with the deficit is to slash government spending down to a level last seen in the 1960s — before programs like Medicare, Pell grants and Head Start had kicked in and long before the baby boom generation was facing retirement.

Of course, Mr. Perry isn’t the only Republican contender calling for cutting taxes on the rich and gutting the government’s ability to pay for important programs. Herman Cain’s “9-9-9” plan is a variant on the flat tax; Newt Gingrich supports a flat tax roughly similar to Mr. Perry’s.

Mitt Romney has not endorsed a flat tax, and in 1996, when Steve Forbes, then a presidential candidate, floated one, Mr. Romney derided it — justifiably — as a “tax cut for fat cats.” But he is in favor of extending the Bush-era tax cuts and cutting taxes on investments and on corporations. And to tame deficits, he has called for hard spending caps, a tool that could lead to indiscriminate and overly harsh cutting.

President Obama has a better plan, but it is only a start. He has called for closing some corporate loopholes, ending the high-end Bush-era tax cuts and capping the value of tax deductions for high-income Americans. Importantly, he would use the new revenue to both finance needed government spending and reduce the deficit.

The country also needs a comprehensive reform of the tax system, one that strengthens progressivity and raises more revenue from a mix of sources. All of the needed revenue — to meet health care needs; to improve education, infrastructure and security; to foster new technologies and protect the environment — cannot be raised from rich Americans, nor from the income tax alone.

It is encouraging that after reflexively rejecting tax increases for so long, more Americans are recognizing that, in fact, incessant tax cutting is largely to blame for the nation’s fragile condition, and that new taxes are part of the solution. If only more politicians would catch up.

A version of this editorial appears in print on October 31, 2011, on page A20 of the New York edition with the headline: Flat Taxes and Angry Voters. Today's Paper|Subscribe